Faculty Lecture with Guest Professor Dan Svantesson

The Faculty of Law invites you to a Faculty Lecture entitled
”Sovereignty and Jurisdiction – Can we start moving away from territoriality?”
with Dan Svantesson, Guest Professor in Private International Law.

The legal concepts of sovereignty and jurisdiction are of central importance in our interconnected world. They delineate States’ rights and responsibilities so as to provide a functioning international rules-based system and to minimise international tension. Traditionally, this has involved States claiming exclusive control over a population and a territory, and the right to make and apply laws there. The online environment challenges these notions, and our current conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction – developed in the 1920s and 1930s – no longer serve us well. 

The faculty lecture expands on a jurisprudential framework for jurisdiction, originally presented ten years ago, and introduces a new jurisprudential framework for sovereignty, anchoring sovereignty in the concept of ‘State dignity’. The common feature of these frameworks is that they both represent a move away from territoriality as the core focal point. This is done with the aim of improving how the concepts of sovereignty and jurisdiction work in the online environment, to minimise conflicts and friction, and to ultimately serve the goal of Cyber peace.

Monday 11 May 2026, at 15.15 - 16.00 in Telaris.
Refreshments will be served afterwards in Gallerian.

Open lecture in English – everyone is warmly welcome!